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 Try to cross-refer between General Registration and census records. If censuses reveal an event that may have been recorded in that special year of 1855 then make it a priority to seek the 1855 record.

 Searching for the birth of someone with a common name may produce a long list of possibilities. For events from 1901 back, you can try to narrow the search by using the place of birth given in census returns.

 If an ancestor was born in the rather dry period 1856-60, see if a sibling was born in 1855 or from 1861 onwards, as then you will learn details of the parents’ marriage.

 Events (especially births) taking place late in one year might be recorded at the start of the next.

 When calculating years of birth from ages stated later in life, don’t forget that the year changed each January. For example, you’d think someone who died in 1950 aged 50 was born in 1900, but if they were aged 50 when they died on 7 June 1950 they could have been born any time between 7 June 1900 and 8 June 1899, so you’d need to search in both those years.

 Some ages were not given accurately, even by the people concerned. Always be prepared to widen your search by a few years either side.

 Occupations could change, but usually not by much. If the father of someone marrying in 1950 was a factory manager, and he appears on a 1922 birth certificate as a junior clerk, then you can see that the clerk could have been promoted to factory manager. If, however, you find an implausible jump from, say, road sweeper to army officer, then you may have found the wrong person.

 However, people tended to elevate their parents’ status, especially after death, so a ship’s mate could easily be described by their proud descendants as a ship’s captain. Fortunes could go down as well as up, so an apparently implausible change from, say, gentleman farmer to road sweeper, could be explained by someone falling on hard times (or the bottle!). You need to judge each case on its own merit.

 Besides seeking Scottish death records for the useful details they provide on parents, it is good practice (and interesting) to discover your ancestors’ deaths anyway. It completes their stories. Sometimes, discovering a death may alert you to a mistake you’ve made: if the supposed ancestor died before your genuine ancestor got married, for example, you’ll know you have found the wrong person and should return to the drawing board.

 If you find several possible births for your ancestor, you can try to ‘kill off’ the red herrings by seeking infant deaths, for many children died in their first few years. This might just leave one possibility, hopefully the right one.

 Married women’s maiden names and surnames are given in the death indexes, making their deaths easier to seek than their husbands’.

 You may find conflicting information on different documents. If so, consider which is more likely to be accurate. Say someone’s marriage and death records give different details about their parents. Which is more likely to be correct? The answer is the marriage, because the person themselves will have stated who their parents were, whereas on the death certificate the details will have been given by someone less likely to know the truth.

 Parents’ names given in death records could be inaccurate or wrong because the informant was a child or grandchild of the deceased and may never have met the deceased’s parents. Even if they had, they may just have known them as ‘granddad’ and ‘grandma’, so the potential for getting details wrong was enormous. If the parents are given as ‘unknown’, this may mean that the deceased person never knew his parents, but more likely that the informant just didn’t know.

 The Scotlands People indexes can be slightly inaccurate and occasionally omit entries. If an entry that should definitely be there is not, it sometimes pays to search the original records at the ScotlandsPeople Centre (or try again later as the computer system is sometimes faulty).

 Not all events were recorded, but the incidence of non-recorded events in Scotland is said to be low. If you do not find what you expect, always think of variant spellings, or of widening the period or geographical area you are searching.

 When you find an entry that is right, print it out or at least make full notes of everything on the record, down to the addresses and witnesses’ names: you never know when something like that will appear on another document and prove a vital clue.

 www.sctbdm.com, the Scotland BDM exchange, is a lucky dip index to some birth, marriage and death information extracted from the original records. If you find an entry of interest you can email the submitter to ask for full details.

 For 1855-75, most Scottish births and marriages are indexed on www.familysearch.org, which can be a useful (and free) shortcut to the ScotlandsPeople indexes.

Mary Queen of Scots (1542-87). Names chosen by the royal family were promptly copied at all levels of society. Mary’s own mother was also called Mary (of Guise), and she was attended by several Scottish noblewomen also all bearing the name Mary. In the ballad ‘The Four Marys’ they are remembered as: ‘There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton And Mary Carmichael and me.’